Zen 2.0

This is a pretty cool compilation of the various technologies in its old and new form.

The least convincing one is probably the mouse. Even though there are small mice, I can’t imagine people using those small mice for a long time and not get sick of it. Human hands haven’t shrunk over the past ten years, so the mouse most likely won’t either.

This is a pretty interesting contest. Netflix is making available to the public 100 million of its customers’ movie ratings so you can help them design a new rating system that’s at least 10% better than what they have today. A better rating system means customers will likely to rent more movies as well as attract many new customers.

You can get more information at Netflix Prize. The download file is 697,552,015 bytes long.

[ Coverage by NY Times ]

Very interesting read on IE + JavaScript Performance Recommendations.

AJAX has been the talk of the web development community since Google came out with Gmail and Google Map. Here’s an interesting view of The 4 States of Ajax Adoption.

Interesting article on exploring the root causes of many coding defects and possible solutions.

More javascript performance tips, Lessons in Javascript Performance Optimisation: 90 seconds down to 3 seconds.

Great article on how to organize CSS files. Given the AJAX popularity these days, CSS knowledge is essential for anyone who wants to play with AJAX. Check out Architecting CSS.

From ajaxian.com:

• Archetype-Based A stylesheet for each class of page, e.g. homepage stylesheet, article stylesheet, etc.
• Page Element/Section-Based A stylesheet for each class of page section, e.g. header stylesheet, sidebar stylesheet.
• Tag-Based Similar to the previous approach, but based around tags, e.g. form stylesheet, table stylesheet.

This is a pretty good overview of the various ajax toolkits out there. Not a lot of detailed analysis but gives you some ideas of what each toolkit does.